HE may be in his mid 40s now but Keanu Reeves hasn’t ruled out the possibility of doofus teenagers Bill and Ted having another excellent adventure.

He and Alex Winter (who played Bill) shot to fame – and inspired countless catchphrases with their slacker slang – as the rock obsessed high-schoolers who travelled through time in a phone booth in order to write a history paper. Although the dark haired actor looks considerably younger than his 44 years, he says that should they make a sequel, it would need to acknowledge the passing years.

“Alex and I talk about playing Bill and Ted in our 50s,” he admits.

“What has been cool about making the films (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey) is that my peer group liked them. Then they went on to have children and Bill and Ted kind of disappeared for a while. But now they’re showing the films to their kids so I am getting little ones coming up to me once in a while and going ‘Be excellent’. That is kind of neat.

“There would have to be a reason to do another film and we don’t have one right now.

“We have spoken to the writers and said ‘You know how Bill and Ted were supposed to save the world, well what if they didn’t?’

“We see them trying to write the one song that would save the world but they are so fixated on it they are ignoring their children and their wives. The metaphor being this whole thing that was supposed to save them takes away their lives.”

Reeves is also concerned with saving the world in his latest film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, not from a megalomaniac intent on global domination, like in Bogus Journey, but from the human race itself.

It is a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic made as tensions

escalated during the Cold War. Then an alien, Klaatu, came to Earth to persuade them to stop their war-mongering ways or face the consequences.

In the new film, by director Scott Derrickson, the message is environmental. Klaatu (Reeves) and the giant robot-like creature Gort, have come to remove the biggest threat to one of the few inhabitable planets – the people who are stripping it and polluting its atmosphere.

“The story is about the Earth being at a crisis point, at a crossroads. And I thought it would be fun to play an alien.”

One of Hollywood’s more enigmatic stars, Reeves possesses an other worldly quality that suited the part of a man hatched fully grown from a biological space suit.

“The character has a scene where he tries to drink a glass of water and he says ‘this body will take some getting used to’. For me that was the launch point, that there was this separateness of the consciousness of the being and its body, and I kind of went from there.”

Although he has said in the past that he dislikes doing sequels because he doesn’t like to do the same things over again (he, wisely as it turned out, declined Speed 2, although he could not resist completing The Matrix trilogy) sci-fi is something he has kept coming back to in movies like Johnny Mnemonic, Chain Reaction and , to some extent, A Scanner Darkly.

“The (roles) are all kind of different. They are adventures, kind of film noiry. Big ideas.”

On Day The Earth Stood Still Keanu worked with young actor Jaden Smith, the son of actor/rapper Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, who co-starred on Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions.